Republicans—think Mitt Romney in the
immediate, bitter aftermath of the election—like to talk about how the safety net of government assistance is really a set of giveaways by President Obama that help ensure he'll get the votes of people receiving assistance. If so, food stamps really
aren't working out for him:
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried. [...]
The Bloomberg review of 2,049 counties where the data was available included the 250 with the highest concentration of food stamp recipients. Among that group, 227 are wholly within one congressional district, with 160 represented by Republicans and 67 by Democrats.
Here's where you know I'm a Democrat: I think Republicans have to eat, too. Actually, I think everyone has to eat, and deserves to. What's more, where Republicans look at high participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and think something must be wrong with the people who need that help, I understand that
it's about the economy, stupid.
Millions of Americans didn't just decide that it would be really fun to live on beans and rice and noodles and go hungry at the end of the month, they got hit with a recession and high unemployment and a minimum wage that's not enough to live on. But Republicans, even as large numbers of their own constituents rely on SNAP, continue to insist that it's an individual affliction of laziness and inadequacy, rather than an outcome of the economy they engineered. Now, they're trying to engineer millions of people off of food stamps, hundreds of thousands of them people who experience food insecurity even with their current assistance levels. The previous House Republican plan to cut $20.5 billion of SNAP funding over 10 years would have kicked 5 million people out of the program; it failed because it wasn't harsh enough, so come September they're going to try to cut $40 billion.
Tell Congress: Oppose all cuts to food stamps.
